“Let’s to market, then,” Eliza said, peering down into Linz’s square with eyes practically shooting sparks.

“Just ride in, find the Street of Ostrich-Plume Merchants, and go from one to the next, playing ’em off against each other?”

Eliza deflated.

“That’s the problem with specialty goods,” Jack said.

“What’s your plan then, Jack?”

“Oh, anything can be sold. In every town is a street where buyers can be found for anything. I make it my business to know where those streets are.”

“Jack, what sort of price do you suppose we’ll fetch at a thieves’ market? We could not conceivably do worse.”

“But we’ll have silver in our pockets, lass.”

“Perhaps the reason you’re the Devil’s Poor is that, having gotten something, you slip into town like a man who expects ill-treatment-possibly including capital punishment-and go straight to the thieves’ market and sell it to a middleman’s middleman’s middleman.”

“Please note that I am alive, free, that I have boots, most of my bodily parts-”

“And a pox that’ll make you demented and kill you in a few years.”

“Longer than I’d live if I went into a town like that one pretending to be a merchant.”

“But my point is-as you yourself said-you need to build up a legacy for your boys now.”

“Precisely what I just proposed,” Jack said. “Unless you’ve a better idea?”

“We need to find a fair where we can sell the ostrich plumes directly to a merchant of fine clothes-someone who’ll take them home to, say, Paris, and sell them to rich ladies and gentlemen.”

“Oh, yes. Such merchants are always eager to deal with Vagabonds and slave-girls.”

“Oh, Jack-that’s simply a matter of dressing up instead of down.”

“There are sensitive men-touchy blokes-who’d find something disparaging in that remark. But I-”

“Haven’t you wondered why, whenever I move, I make all of these rustling and swishing noises?” She demonstrated.

“I’m too much the gentleman to make inquiries about the construction of your undergarments-but since you mentioned it-”

“Silk. I’ve about a mile of silk wrapped around me, under this black thing. Stole it from the Vizier’s camp.”

“Silk! I’ve heard of it.”

“A needle, some thread, and I’ll be every inch a lady.”

“And what will I be? The imbecile fop?”

“My manservant and bodyguard.”

“Oh, no-”

“It’s just play-acting! Only while we’re in the fair! The rest of the time, I’m as ever your obedient slave, Jack.”

“Since I know you like to tell fables, I’ll play-act with you briefly. Now begging your pardon, but doesn’t it take time to sew fine costumes out of Turkish silk?”

“Jack, many things take time. This will only take a few weeks.”

“A few weeks. And you’re aware that you are now in a place that has winters? And that this is October?”

“Jack?”

“Eliza?”

“What does your zargon-network tell you of fairs?”

“Mostly they are in spring or autumn. We want the Leipzig one.”

“We do?” Eliza seemed impressed. Jack was gratified by this-a bad sign. No man was more comprehensively doomed than him whose chief source of gratification was making favorable impressions on some particular woman.

“Yes, because it is where goods of the East, coming out of Russia and Turkey, are exchanged for goods of the West.”

“For silver, more likely-no one wants Western stuff.”

“That’s correct, actually. Your elder Vagabonds will tell you that the Parisian merchants are best robbed on the road to Leipzig, as that’s when they carry silver, whereas on the way back they have goods that must be tediously hauled around and fenced. Though your young fellows will take issue with that, and say that no one carries silver anymore-all business is done with bills of exchange.”

“At any rate, Leipzig is perfect.”

“Except for the small matter that the autumn fair’s already over, and we’ll have a winter to survive before the next one.”

“Keep me alive through that winter, Jack, and come spring, in Leipzig, I’ll fetch you ten times what you’d get down there. ”

This was not a proper Vagabond method-making a plan six months in advance. The error was compounded a thousandfold by the prospect of spending so much time with one particular woman. But Jack had already trapped himself by mentioning his sons.

“Still thinking about it?” Eliza asked, some time later.

“Stopped thinking about it long ago,” Jack said. “Now I’m trying to remember what I know of the country between here and Leipzig.”

“And what have you remembered thus far?”

“Only that we’ll see nothing alive that is more than fifty years old.” Jack began walking toward a Danube ferry. Turk followed and Eliza rode in silence.

THREE DAYS NORTHof the Danube, the road focused to a rut in a crowd of scrawny trees that were striving to rise clear from a haze of grasping weeds. The weeds seethed with bugs and stirred with small unseen beasts. Paving-blocks skewed out of pounded ground, forming a sort of shoal that unsettled Turk, who straightened, blinked suspiciously, and slowed. Jack drew the Janissary’s sword out of the rolled blanket where it had been hid since Vienna and washed the dried blood off in a creek-bend. When it was clean, he stood in a buttress of sunlight, thigh-deep in brown water, nervously wiping it and swinging it in the air.

“Something troubling you, Jack?”

“Since the Papists slew all the decent folk, this is a country of bandits, haiduks, and Vagabonds-”

“I guessed that. I meant, something about the sword?”

“Can’t seem to get it dry-that is, it’s dry to the touch, but it ripples like a brook in the sun.”

Eliza answered with a scrap of verse:

Watered steel-blade, the world perfection calls,

Drunk with the viper poison foes appals.

Cuts lively, burns the blood whene’er it falls;

And picks up gems from pave of marble halls.

“… or so says the Poet.”

“What manner of poet speaketh such barbarities?” Jack scoffed.

“One who knew more of swords than you. For that is Damascus steel, more than likely. It might be more valuable than Turk and the ostrich plumes summed.”

“Save for this defect,” Jack said, fitting the ball of his thumb into a notch in the edge, not far from the point. Around it the steel was blackened. “I wouldn’t’ve thought it could happen.”

“That’s where it cut into your musket’s soft belly?”

“Soft? You saw only the wooden stock. But concealed within was an iron ramrod, running the whole length of the weapon through a skinny hole augered into the wood, alongside the musket-barrel itself. This sword cut through the wood-no great feat-but then it must’ve sliced clean through the ramrod, and then well into the barrel-deep enough to make it weak there. When the powder finally caught, it shoved the ball up only as far as the weak place, and then the barrel burst-that was the end of the Janissary, for he had his face up practically-”

“I saw it. You’re rehearsing the story, aren’t you, to entertain your friends?”

“I have no friends. It’s to cow mine enemies.” Jack thought this sounded formidable, but Eliza stared at the horizon and heaved a sigh.

“Or,” she said, “it could entice a buyer who was in the market for a legendary blade…”

“I know it’s difficult, but put all thoughts of markets out of your mind. As the Grand Vizier recently learned, all the riches in the world are of no use if you can’t defend ’em. This is wealth, and the means to defend it, combined into one-perfection.”

“Do you suppose that a man with a sword and a horse will be defense enough, in a place like this?”